Playing & Trading Strategy

I've gotten a bit behind, so this is actually the update for the previous week, Saturday February 27th - Saturday March 4th.  There will be a second post following for the week just ending this past Saturday.

We were up a very modest 1.4% for that period, mainly due to the Academy Award nom cashouts and moving with the ups and downs of The Young Messiah and its derivatives.  While we didn't have many Award options in play, we did have a few winners.  There wasn't too much of a surprise profit in the winners by the time of cashout; and we'd even swapped Winslet and Vikander out at the right time for the Supporting Actress win.  So we benefited by Winslet going up early and then going down later as Vikander became the favorite.  We were also on the right side of London Has Fallen, but the opening was flat without really any money to be made.

And that's become a larger problem of the current Universal portfolio.  I'm not sitting at my computer day trading 24/7, but I do check on 2-3 times a day.  However, I'm not always able to play every small movement in the moment, and instead have to play the larger trends.  But because the studio funds start with just $10 (as opposed to all of the other funds that start with $20), and because we can't play starbonds, we're very limited to what we can initially buy.  Now that the portfolio size has grown large enough to actually buy more things, most of our stocks releasing before August cashout are already about where they probably will end up.  So short of a staggering success like last year's Jurassic World or this year's Deadpool for FOXX, it's hard to make big profits.  And not only has Universal not had any huge successes this season, almost all of our releases have been failures or flat openers.

I will probably be experimenting over the next couple of weeks to try to maximize profits better than I have been of late.  If the films opening between now and August don't have that much movement left, it may make more sense to put a sizeable portion of the portfolio in releases that are farther out and still have more movement left instead of parking them in stagnant stocks still 2-3 months out.  I'll still be keeping at least 50% of the funds for openers and derivatives and releases that are close out.  I'll end the conversation on that note and pick it back up in the post for episode 26; so for now let's move on to look at 3 more Universal releases.

Desperadoes

Consider this one dead in the water.  It was an all-female Hangover knockoff to star Isla Fisher and be directed by Betty Thomas that IPO'd back in 2011 and hasn't had news since 2012.  Fisher is no longer attached in the imdb listing, and the project seems to be permanently stalled.  Trading at 26 cents, it's probably not even worth shorting for a minimal profit that could take forever to be officially cancelled and cashout.

Emily the Strange

in the 90's, the goth, pre-teen Emily character became very successful both in comics and across a clothing line, but now the stock for her feature trades at 32 cents.  HSX lists Chole Grace Moretz as attached, but imdb does not, and Moretz is probably starting to get long in the tooth for the character.  There hasn't been news on this one since 2013 when Moretz was first attached.  Consider it dead as well.

Fire

And at 17 cents, we've got another comic development deal with no news since 2013, this time to star Zac Efron in a Brian Michael Bendis adaptation.  The IPO was back in 2010 and there hasn't been any news in 2+ years, and Efron doesn't seem to be attached any longer.  So this week brings us a hat trick of dead projects that will likely never see production, especially with the currently listed talent.

Our next release, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, opens wide on March 25th.  Episode 26 (this week's episode) should also be up shortly.